With the existing crisis in securing adequate amounts of energy and since petroleum supplies are not regular in availability and price, the national programs for producing electric energy rather prefer to develop local energy sources. In this preferred development, coal is the main source to consider which is the first fuel to be used in power production and is more abundant and more regularly distributed in the World than oil. The resources in coal are divided in low and high thermal value. They are also divided according to their sulfur content which by burning the solid fuels becomes sulfur dioxide creating toxic environmental pollution. With that problem, the utilization of solid fuels is restricted to those containing low sulfur and create as low as possible environmental damage.
In relation to coal and to its utilization in the production of electric energy it is observed that by its burning, the result in electric energy is low, it releases high amounts of sulfur dioxide, fly ash and nitric oxides and it creates high corrosion in the equipment.
Additionally, by burning solid fuels high amounts of carbon dioxide are produced which today are considered a major pollution factor, being the main source for the green-house conditions emerging in our Planet. And all these environmental and production problems appear more critical by the use of solid fuels of low calorific values such as lignites and peats.
To face these problems today there exist solutions leading to the reduction of the sulfur content in those low calorific fuels and to the neutralization of the combustion gases.
Those solutions, however, are costly and the corrections offered, because of cost, do not make them attractive. A better approach appears to be the gasification of those low calorific fuels as an action attractive today in spite of its leading to high losses of energy. With total gasification the gases can be washed to separate them from the toxic gases and the flying ash but with total gasification the thermal value is further reduced to 65-70% and expensive industrial installations are needed in the operation.
In the meantime, however, with the development of gas turbines in the production of power more economical solutions are available to utilize gases. Our original solution is such a method which utilizes the fuel gases produced in Co-Gas advanced systems by which the degree of produced electric energy with the use of air turbines and combined cycle is improved. For operating the gas turbines, however, we need fuel gases free of corrosives and free of tars and liquid byproducts, but also of the highest possible thermal value.